Category Archives: Southern Discomfort Tour

We are on the road. It seems like a blur—Maryland, then Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. This morning, Alabama. Every place has a different story in my family tree and another set of stories and meanings for the Ancestors who lived in each state and county. I am overwhelmed with the thought of just seeing the places that my Ancestors were and imagining the lives they lived.

From the Big House to the Kitchen

Our first event was in North Carolina hosted by Flyleaf Books, an Independent Bookstore in Chapel Hill. Sponsored by ChopNC and UNC Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, I gave a talk on enslaved foodways in colonial and antebellum North Carolina. The reporter covering the event for the Durham Herald-News was named Cliff Bellamy–a white guy. If you’ve been keeping up with the blogs, you know that was the last name of my great-great-great grandfather Richard Henry Bellamy, born to planter families in northeastern NC. His Bellamy’s were part of a line that went to South Carolina from England and then to North Carolina. Essentially, if you went way way way way back you’d probably find we have a common male ancestor. I’m fully prepared for more of these “coincidences” as we make our way further on the tour.

In the upcoming days I will profile my experiences cooking at Somerset Place and my first time back in Alabama since age 14. Until then, enjoy a few shots from the tour as it has progressed!

Talking With Mama Dip–Mrs. Mildred Council about the old days in Chapel Hill, NC

Sitting in front of a enslaved person’s reconstructed cabin at Somerset Place Plantation Creswell, NC

Friendly Reminder: Sunday May 6th at 11:59 pm our campaign is done. Its going to mean cutting places, venues, community service opportunies, and losing time to do genealogical research if we don’t make our goal–so please please please don’t take my work here for granted and all the sweat our team has put into this blog and this project and all the work of our network of volunteers. We just need 162 funders to contribute 18$ or more each to make this project a flesh and blood reality. Don’t just peek–do what you can while you can. We love you and know that you want to see the world a better place. G-d bless, Michael! Here’s the link to make your contribution: http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Cooking-Gene-Project-The-Southern-Discomfort-Tour

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Let’s start here….

The first basket is always the easiest…

So about 150 years ago, my paternal grandfather’s ancestors in upcountry South Carolina and my maternal grandparents ancestors in northern, central and eastern Alabama, Tennesse and Georgia all worked and lived on cotton plantations of various sizes. By the early 19th century, cotton already accounted for over half of the United States’ exports. My Ancestors helped grow, cultivate and harvest the four million plus bales of cotton produced in 1860–or about a bale per enslaved individual living at the time. How much is a bale? About 500 pounds. A man my size and age might be expected to pick anywhere between 250-350 pounds a day…so almost a bale a day. Hence–(I’m gwine to jump down spin around, pick a bale a cotton, gwine to jump down spin around, and pick a bale a day!”) Cotton didn’t just provide fiber to overseas markets—it helped fuel the industrial revolution in the North to which new immigrants from Northern Europe would provide labor. Most Southern whites were not slaveholders, and those that did largely at smaller holdings in terms of land and workforce. However these facts may be true they exist alongside a paradox–most enslaved African Americans lived in groupings of 10-20 or more. Without this kind of population bunching, family growth and cultural formation and continuity could not have taken place making for the cohesive Black cultural identity of the plantation South. Only a quarter of all Southern slaveholders had planter status (20 or more enslaved workers) With 20 or more able bodied workers you could live the life of a middling planter. When you had about 50-100 people you were pretty rich, and with over 100–which only a select few could claim–you were unbelieveably wealthy. Going back to the 5-10 people holdings—–you can probably bet these were not all whites trying to make their way up in the world in the 1840s-1860s. Most likely these are people owned by members of the same family—-they are inheritances and traded among cousins or siblings. In these situations, landholdings might be contiguous or relatively close allowing for marriages and other kinship patterns to emerge as if they were in fact part of a larger plantation community.

Scaling “the Wall”

Admitedly, part of this journey is about breaking down, “the Wall,” the barrier of time and space that so frustrates many African Americans doing genealogical research before 1860. You have to know your families’ “owners,” including the surname, the individual property lines, the counties, their biographical data, etc. etc. You have to learn all about them in order to discern whose who in your family tree. If you are lucky you will get some legal papers—andy many many were destroyed in and after the War…or you will find property or auction lists or wills. In South Carolina we belonged to the Twitty, Mungo, Reeves and Pate families of the South Carolina upcountry. In Alabama we were the property of the Bellamy, Townsend, Hancock and Hughes families. In Russell County, Alabama my great-great-great Grandfather, Captain Richard Henry Bellamy CSA, was both my families’ slaveholder and an ancestor. In Northern Alabama, my family was owned by the Townsend brothers in Madison County, Alabama who had large cotton plantations with lots of enslaved people. In that case at least we know that my Ancestors lived on one of the two brothers large holdings (they had eight plantations). The Townsend brothers both died with the desire to liberate many of their enslaved laborers and their families.

It Sucked…

I bring all of this up because there were some very very complicated relationships going on in our history. Both my paternal grandparents came from enslaved Ancestors who were “married” in 1861. Some formal recognition was going on. And both families obtained land within years of emancipation to one generation after. This is not to say that there probably wasn’t significant brutality and oppression of my Ancestors. I think you have to be real—this was slavery, my great-great grandmother was taken advantage of against her will along with other women in my family tree–and frequently. These people didn’t get a paycheck–or an education—and didn’t have the right to vote, marry, or the right to move around as they saw fit. They were legally forbidden from reading or writing and they lived lives of severe restriction and control. Family values–forget it–my Ancestors were sold away from one another without any concern for their emotions, psychological stablity, familal bond, or the decency of Spirit. As a community they were told to believe they were naturally inferior, undeserving of G-d’s love and bound for hell if they did not obey their Masters who supposedly represented G-d on earth to them as “servants.” Enslaved children saw parents whipped, ate worm and parasite infested food, went naked much of the year and some were physically or sexually abused by their owners and overseers and patrollers who policed the Southern countryside on behalf of the planter class. Given the high volume of biracial Ancestors in my family trees some of them undoubtedly faced teasing, ostracism and likely abuse for their identities. My African ancestors arriving here against their will probably experienced unbelieveable heartache and traumatic stress in their transition to exile America. Those are the facts…

Not bitter, not angry–just telling the truth. I’m teach about the Holocaust in Hebrew school–how would have me tell the story of my Ancestors in slavery if not in clear terms of “it was complicated, it was bad, it was confusing, its legacy is unending and its our history and we need to deal with it.” Nuff said. Moving on.

An Heirloom Plantation Meal

Cotton and Slavery’s Food Supply–A Primer

Food and slavery was colloquial and discretionary. Judging from the strange and complcated relationships had my Ancestors with their “owners,” I can guess that the relationship with the food supply was probably interesting as well. If your ancestors lived on cotton plantations in the Deep South, by 1860 they probably lived on a diet based on corn and pork in their preserved form. Corn=hominy, hominy grits, cornmeal, cornbread, hoecake/ashcake, mush, kush—a cornbread scramble made with hot pepper, fat and onions, dumplings, meal breading, cornbread/cornpone, corn liquor, and corn on the cob (green corn). Pork=salted and smoked meat, offal (the heads, feet, tails, intestines, ears and the like) were the predominant carbohydrate and protein of the Cotton Kingdom. Only occasionally would people enjoy fresh meat in other forms–beeves, sheep, goats, chicken, fish, or game. And of course there were gardens….if you were allowed to keep them. In the word of King Cotton–industrial style slavery had taken hold. Probably–and this is me guestimating here–only about 2/3 of enslaved people living under King Cotton were allowed to keep their own garden spaces in any signficant way. Many enslaved people reported not being allowed to do any work or labor other than working in cotton or receiving garden truck from a large communal garden maintained by the elderly. The most commonly mentioned field crops were cabbage, cowpeas, watermelons, and sweet potatoes–often grown in their own separate fields and after that–enslaved people might grow greens gardens–usually collards and turnips—and string beans and white potatoes were usually the remaining big crops. Other foods like homegrown rice, red peppers, peanuts, tomatoes, herbs, pumpkins, okra and the like were infrequently dispersed and we should not think of them as being necessarily common. This system was not based in part on a new literature unique to the antebellum era where the management, care, and control of enslaved people was a frequent subject of agricultural and trade journals basically encouraging planters to maximize results and get more bang for their bale.

Rations of salt, molasses, coffee, white flour, orchard fruit (apples, peaches, etc.) and the like rounded out any sort of gathered, hunted, caught foods avaialble within the plantation ecosystem. I like to describe game as usually belonging to the four food groups–including possum, squirrel, rabbit and racoon. Living in largely landlocked places, various species of catfish, perch, buffalo, bream, bass, trout, gar, crawfish and freshwater clams and mussels formed the surf to your turf. Usually those If you’re ancestors were subjects of King Cotton like mine, this is probably how they ate.

Each plantation crop during slavery had its own unique food profile. Among the enslaved people of sugarcane alley and the rice coast, African, tropical American and Afro-Caribbean foods were available to round out the diet. In the old Tobacco Kingdom, personal gardens and access to Tidewater fishing grounds rich in both fresh and saltwater species, crustaceans, mollusks and reptiles were among the reasons why the Black population multiplied and reproduced at a natural rate almost incomprable with any other community of Blacks in the New world. Most enslaved workers on the sugar, coffee, rice and cotton plantations of Latin America and the Caribbean died within seven years of arrival, right up to the last days of slavery. Virginia and Maryland would lend most of their workforce to the Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, while others would end up in Western Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. There they would join people from the Carolinas and eastern Georgia and the Lower Mississippi Valley sold across the Cotton Kingdom. When these two group merged so did their dietary practices. Rice cultivation and consumption spread from the Gullah-Geechee corridor and the Lower Mississippi Valley into the Lower South while the corn culture and turnip greens and the like dominated the Upper South.

Food tells you a lot about how we got to be how we are….In 1750 we were anywhere from 1-3 generations removed from Africa…if that…….We were not largely Afro-Christian and there were various dialects of Black English and Black French–read Gullah/Geechee, Patois, Creole, etc. In 1850 we were largely 4-5 generations removed from Africa (especially in the Upper South) while in the Lower South this number was lower owing to the late slave trade. We were largely Afro-Christian LEANING (varieties of Baptist and Methodist) with elements of folk religion and we spoke a generalized Plantation Creole English based largely on those dialects from Maryland, Virginia and upper North Carolina with inflections and loan words in the Deep South from Gullah/Geechee and Afro-Creole dialects of French in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Our music was the “Virginia music” based on gourd banjos, rattles, the bones, the fiddle, triangle and clandestine drums made from gourds, barrels, and boxes, flutes, quills and mouthbows.

How does it feel to pick cotton?

Cotton is an extremely beautiful crop in the Southern fields….it is heartbreakingly beautiful…soft, inviting, miraculous. Out an almost alien like green shell pops out a clear and delicate whiteness that soon envelops the boll’s space until the green turns to a brown husk. The field turns a blinding white–the whiteness of the link is set afire and gleams wih the sunlight until you can’t see anything else. It is repetiive, painful, and makes your back ache. Doing this alone you can understand why field hollers, the blues, and all of that music—was created to endure this mechanical, backbreaking process. And until you’ve picked cotton–you have no idea how a hoecake “should,” taste, or how far we’ve come….

Hoecake:

1 cup of white stone-ground cornmeal

3/4 cup of boiling hot water

½ teaspoon of salt

¼ cup of lard, vegetable oil or shortening

Mix the cornmeal and salt in a bowl. Add the boiling water, stir constantly and mix it well and allow the mixture to sit for about ten minutes. Melt the frying fat in the skillet and get it hot, but do not allow it to reach smoking. Two tablespoons of batter can be scooped up to make a hoecake. Form it into a small thin pancake and add to the pan. Fry on each side 2-3 minutes until firm and lightly brown. Set on paper towels to drain and serve immediately once all the hoecakes have been cooked.

When I first started entertaining the idea that I would devote time and energy to food writing, as opposed to just eating and talking about food; I tried my hand at peeling the Big Apple for its culinary secrets. I kept finding myself out of the loop. Everywhere I looked seemed to be passe, hackneyed, old, brand new, out of the moment, in the moment….I felt two hours too late or ten years behind. The gastronomic capital of the world felt like a poisoned feast where things were always passed due—but beloved, or just being born and distrusted or embraced with an intensely passionate novelty-love….all on a grid I never really seemed to be able to navigate. I spent a day each month for 8 months demonstrating recipes for the greenmarket at Union Square, I chatted up vendors, bought heirloom tomatoes from Tim Stark, apples from Upstate, fingerlings from Joe–whose last name I still don’t know–but whose earth-stained hands showed me I could trust every word he said about his potatoes. Maple candy, some fish we Marylanders would never call “striped bass,” garlic scapes, goat cheese I’m sure I paid way too much money for, a Korean-American farm’s Concord grape and apple punch I always bought a quart of, and O’Henry yams….surely an education but not quite enough

I was always sort of an anomaly there—I wore the kippah–and invariably collected stares and inquiries that unnerved some and drew others in. Jewish school groups would cluster in and ask, “Ma Nishmah?” or “Is it kosher?” I could never look up fast enough to see if it was a test/challenge or a genuine verbal hug. Happy was my soul when a Lubavitcher said Chag Sameach (Happy Holiday!) during Sukkos! In the most Jewish place on earth outside of Eretz Israel, there I was at the center and the periphery—not unlike the rest of my people….

The African immigrants and Caribbean family were close but a tiny bit far away from where I was “located.” Many couldn’t get over their shock that an African-American knew where their country was or its capital. “How you know about that man?” We talked about sadza, mountain chicken–which is definitely not chicken–, soursop, fufu, alligator pepper, and the bins of niebe–cowpeas from Senegal in Harlem. Some gave me kinship, others disdain. To the African-Americans the first question was usually, “Where are your people from?”

My answer was always, “Yonder.”

It was like a code word. Like “amcho” during World War II in the concentration camps; or “Lundsman” on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century; a shibboleth that meant, “my roots are down South.” If they laughed at my response, they got my genealogy al-regel-achat–(on one foot)…if they didn’t I know they couldn’t go very far beyond Bedford-Stuyvestant, Adam Clayton Powell, southside Queens, or Yonkers. It dawned on me, that it is the unrelenting search for ourselves in others that leads us to find out who we are, as if another’s understanding was a mirror probing deeper than the flesh and tendons and rawness of our meat….

The food told them I was kin. The food was pointing in the direction where I was, where I belonged, what I was a part of, and what I brought to the table. My terroir was not the asphalt and parkland, greenspace and rooftop gardens and honeybee laced urban air–it was the fields and farms of the past, the scary scary past–the colonial and antebellum past—with its bayous, backwoods, creeks, swamps, mountainsides, Black Belts, sandy bottomlands and sweeping subtropical valleys. My terroir was my enslaved past–and the enslaved past of us all.

Guineas—African Birds in the Lowcountry

My plate was haunted. It had been haunted all along. I didn’t know where the newest hotspot was at the corner of so and so and such and such. I didn’t have a clue–and still don’t why being a Chicagoan means eating a hot dog covered in what appears to be salad fixins to an outsider—or why if you don’t fuse your food in LA you are damn near called a segregationist. Meh….bah….I was eating with my forebears, growing with them, taking advice, living on the cusp of breathing and the permanent silence and cool of the grave. I was from Yonder, I cooked from a place in my soul called Yonder, and to Yonder I would return. “Over Yonder,” where my stories lie was where blackberries grew on the hills outside of Birmingham; or the sweet potato field in Lancaster county, SC that got my grandfather and his orphaned siblings through the Depression; the pippins fried in butter and topped off with sorghum molasses in Prince Edward county, VA. I never tasted any of these–I just heard about them until the people who talked about them died. I was supposed to be thankful for those edibles–because if they were not, I would not be.

Making 18th Century Bacon

I am a product of the eaters and the eaten. Co-evolved. I am Ned the Hog—so much for my Kosher Soul, huh? I am the critter they call rat-de-bois in the bayou country, you know him as possum. I am the crawfish that made mud towers in the cities of the dead; and I am the dominiker chickens that faded into the unconscious seeing their world spin like a merry go round. Over Yonder was where the crowder peas came from that my mother had to shell at my grandfather’s insistence on the step in Cinncinati, and the sugarcane and country melons that made Over Yonder seem like a foreign land–and it was to her and her siblings–they never went Over Yonder, because once my grandmother left Over Yonder, she couldn’t see herself going back to the un-promised Land.

Standing at Stono

In my maternal grandmothers’ day you turned over the plate after Grace to eat. My haunted plate, turned over , so shined, so polished revealed my face and all the faces that stared into it before me, going back to a face that had never seen a plate like that before.

Virginia/North Carolina/South Carolina/Georgia/Tennessee/Alabama=home

To Be a Slave

I am always surprised how many people “don’t get it.” Furniture, dishes, wallpaper, plaster moulding, receipt books, gardens laid out in Enlightenment orgasms of symmetry and reason….

When my friend Wisteria Perry worked at Pamplin Historical Park in Petersburg, Virginia; I cried when I saw the log. Damn, that log beat any table carved from mahogany and chiseled and carved by who the hell ever. That log was hauled out a tupelo bog. Some of my people may have served somebody at the fine mahogany table, but their table was the log–and you know what they say in Africa–sit at my table, eat and you will know me. That beautiful rotten log with the chipped leftover china and cracked gourd. The gourd that made people think of flying North to freedom and made well water sweet….Somebody has to sit at that log and keep the traditions going–that came from Africa, mixed with Europe and Native America and made the U.S. into Us.

The Log

I cried when I saw the tough for that matter too. It was from Louisiana and was part of the America I Am exhibit through Tavis Smiley and the National Geographic Society. That trough was everywhere from Maryland to Texas, Missouri to Florida. That trough made Frederick Douglass want to learn to read and run the hell away from slavery. The civil war began at that trough.

It’s not all about the past you know–its standing in the kitchen of the Lee ancestral home, Stratford Hall and having guests laugh at you when you’ve spilled some water on the hearth….and you can tell its not a nice laugh…You’ve been on your feet for hours, you’ve built the fire, you’re exhausted, you’ve carried 60 pound pots…and you have a table full of things you’ve cooked and you feel embarrassed and the people who are watching you seem remarkably unsympathetic even mocking–as if they—could do this–day after day after day–

Hauling the Pots

–

Hauling the Pickings

Did they know I could have been whipped if was enslaved in that time for a mistake like that? Taught a lesson? This horrifies me, this “Over Yonder” place, where you cross rivers and you cross time and all of a sudden things are unfathomable. A slave was not a job position or a member of a caste. An enslaved person was property, a possession considered subhuman, a draft animal.

Did they also know that as a cook I could be a real bastard and tell them all to get out? Rolled eyes, smirks, laughter…Bemusement my tuchus. Those early Black cooks were not necessarily demanding mammies and faithful eunuch-like uncles as they have been depicted—they were channels of power, gatekeepers in modern corporate-speak—lions of the one room where tempers could flare like the almost everlasting flames in the hearth. There is so much to be learned from these dynamics—the last one to go was the cook.

Struggling to wake up./Half burned hoecake/day old mush/off to the field/up before dawn/striking the fire/punching down the dough/breakfast ready when Miss is in the kitchen/making the morning meal alongside Miss/breakfast served at a fine table at 7/breakfast taken to the field with Miss/being yelled at for spilling/burning your arm/the day has to go on/nobody cares about your lower back/old mamas cooking over an iron pot under a shelter for the folks in the field/hoecake lady making her mark/going shopping with Miss toting the baskets in the city streets/babies fed at the trough–muddy hands at all/cuts on the hands-nobody cares/mama feeds baby by field nursing with the only food nobody controls but her/baby lying in the grass/lullaby/all the pretty little horses/lunch break in the field/feel full/hold it down/300 pounds a day/sugar house/rice task/priming leaves/stained hands/hemp/wheat/corn/ironworks and salt pork/Adams in the garden picking up leaves/mamas stir the peas and pork/do not ruin the roux/cabbage bubbles for all white and black on this small farm/supper is to be prompt at 2 the Madisons are coming from over yonder–8 hours on an oxcart/fine dinner service/ham and turkey you will never taste or touch/damn you/no tarts/no salamagundi/no quince preserves/no tasso/prepare for supper/catfish stew/hoecake and buttermilk/possum time/spitting/joking/mush again–same as yesterday/leftovers supper/dishes time/stories from Africa/lullabies/hush harbor/fall into bed, work at 4/if the rooster crows you’re already late/always hungry/always wanting/always empty

On April 9, 1865, in Appomattox, Virginia my great-great Grandfather Elijah Mitchell was standing with his brother when he witnessed the surrender of Lee to Grant…and this is how he found out that he was free…as copied from a family history file left to my Father:

“Appomattox County is a historical place in the commonwealth of Virginia. This is the place where General Lee surrendured to General Grant in 1865. Grandpa Elijah was a house slave and his brother, was a field slave. Grandpa at the age of 16 stood by the side of the road and saw the two generals come out of the McClean House and read the papers stating the end of the war. Grandpa never forgot this moment because he and his brother knew that at last they were free and everybody was free. They fell into each other’s arms and wept. Grandpa’s former master later gave them 30 acres of land and this is recorded i the records at Appomattox County, Virginia….”

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? “Southern Discomfort” Tour Back to the Old South
An African American Culinary Historian Searches for his Family’s Food Roots and Slaveowners.

Washington, D.C. –From May through July 2012, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty will travel from Maryland to Louisiana tracing his ancestry across the South while he cooks up the story of enslaved people in America. Visiting over fifty Southern locales, the core of the journey will follow two tracks searching for the plantations and gravesites of his enslaved ancestors as well as sites of culinary memory and slavery. The “Southern Discomfort Tour” will additionally feature contemporary issues that stem from this important legacy.

The Southern Discomfort Tour, which has already gained national recognition and was recently featured in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (here), will draw attention to the plight of African American farmers and feature community service projects focused on healthier eating and increasing food justice. The Tour will also use the story of the African heritage of Southern food to promote racial reconciliation and healing.

Food Historian Michael Twitty set upon his journey to answer the question, if an African American culinary historian were able to trace his story through food back through slavery to West and Central Africa, could he break bread with the people who owned his family?

“I believe everybody should occupy their heritage.” Twitty said. “I hope The Cooking Gene more than open people’s eyes about slavery through my family’s story, but, even more I hope it inspires them to repair the broken world that was its consequence—and we want to show people how to do that. This Southern Discomfort, sets out to contextualize the African American contribution to American foodways and give honor to all enslaved African Americans.”

Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian, Jewish educator and living history professional from the Washington D.C. area. He has given over 125 presentations about the complexities of history, identity, race and religion for the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, Colonial Williamsburg and the Symposium on Food and Cookery at St. Catherine’s College of Oxford University England. For complete details about the Tour participants, route, schedule, venues and opportunities to interact with the journey–visit: http://thecookinggene.com
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Writer Andrea (Andi) Cumbo has a project in the same family of The Cooking Gene entitled “You Will Not Be Forgotten,” a fascinating project that examines the history of the plantation where she lives in Fluvanna County, Virginia. It just so happens that Andi knows people with the surname Booker, which represents a large group of whites and blacks who come from the Booker family farms and plantations of central Virginia. That’s also one of my major immediate family names. I will be visiting Andi has part of The Cooking Gene project and I will be sure to videopress the dialogue and our cooking experience. I think the work she is doing is fantastic and I hope you will support both of our projects! Her information follows the interview along with mine!

Andi Cumbo

Welcome Andi!

1. How did you come to grow up on a historic plantation? Where is it located?

We moved here when I was 14 and my father took a job as the farm manager here. He was brought in to manage the house and grounds and start a shade tree nursery. The plantation is in central Virginia, between Charlottesville and Richmond in Fluvanna County.

2. What’s the history of the site?

The plantation was built as the final of three joined plantations by General John Hartwell Cocke, a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and member of the original Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia.

3. Why did you decide to do a project about the enslaved who lived there?

Sometime when I was in college, it occurred to me that some of the people I went to high school with may have been descended from people who were enslaved on this plantation. That idea really struck me as important, particularly because that thought had never occurred to me in the years I lived here. Then, when I began working at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, I got very invested in Civil Rights history and wanted to see how slavery’s legacy had lingered and created the need for that struggle.

The Grave of Primus, enslaved 19th Century

4. Food is a wonderful way to bridge the past. Are there any hints of the foodways of the enslaved there? You mentioned your fathers humble roots. What did his family eat, grow, hunt and raise when he was younger?

We really don’t have any records about the foodways of the people enslaved here. I know they grew gardens, as was common, but beyond that I don’t have any dishes or cookware to suggest what they might have eaten.

My dad grew up as a tobacco sharecropper in eastern NC. His family ate what most poorer people in the South. They raised their own garden and ate from it and raised chickens. Grits, collards, biscuits, molasses – anything that was fairly inexpensive or could be grown.

5. As a white person willingly exploring this history and uncovering things that might be hurtful, what lessons do you have for others who might want delve into similar research?

You have to earn your right to tell these stories by proving yourself trustworthy and showing that you recognize not only your own privilege as a white person but also the honor that it is to tell these stories. You also have to know that not everyone is going to be happy that you are doing this research, but that many people will support you wholeheartedly. If you are called to this research, led to it by a sense of justice and a search for truth and understanding, then you should do it – with integrity and humility

6. What are some things you are learning about yourself and your relationship to history through this process?

Great question. I have really come to understand my own place of privilege in history. As a white person, I have an easier time in the world than any person of color – that has become very apparent. I’ve also come to know my own racism – the way that growing up in the South has shaped my perceptions about African American people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I have uncovered layers of racism that I didn’t even know I carried, and I have had to learn how to dig those things out of myself and challenge them, sometimes publicly, so that they can be eradicated. I have also learned that shining light on something – in myself and in others – is the first step to getting rid of it.

7. As I prepare to go South and visit places unique to slavery and culinary memory and my family’s enslaved past, do you have any advice or words of wisdom?

Be brave and be able to sit in a conversation until the heat dies down. People will probably say ignorant and hateful things – unintentionally or intentionally – but if you are able (and I don’t know if I would be able if I were you), stay in those conversations and challenge people to learn and grow. Speak honestly and directly. Don’t play the passive-aggressive word games that Southerners are so good at – just be straight forward with what you think and want – but be prepared for people not to like that. And expect to be blown away by the goodness and grace of people, too. I constantly am.

The Overseers House

8. I’m reaching out to the descendants of the families that owned my families-do you have any sort of message for descendants of slaveowners or people who live on historic properties related to slavery?

Own your history – all of it. Honor the people who built the places where you live – the enslaved people and the free people. Slavery is part of history, and until we own it – in all it’s horrible complexity – we have no hope of breaking the way it binds us still.

“African Americans are innately wired to want to know who we are. Its almost being like an adopted child.”—Sharon Malone, commentator, “Slavery by Another Name.”

A few days ago I almost gave up on The Cooking Gene. I will admit, I am an impatient man. I am not attracting significant support from African Americans. I believed, perhaps, naively that the whole community would see the value and “church up” and put their might and means behind this project. So many of us are growlingly pissed off when we hear about the Old South availing itself at historic sites and the exclusion of African Americans from history. I don’t know if its the economy or just an unwillingness to part with Starbucks (and the like) for a few days, but this project has not met with great support from the African American community. My purpose in being forthright about this is to call attention to the idea that the white people–and others–who are donating to this project are not doing so because they “owe” me or anybody else anything. They are doing this out of the good of their heart. They are doing this because they truly believe this history needs to be taught and this story must be told.

If anybody “owes” anybody anything it is our community that owes its children the opportunity to see history written and taught by the winners–that is–we the African American who survived on our Ancestor’s backs to tell the tale. I thank with all my might, being, mind and soul all of the African American donors thus far. You get it–you understand that ten dollars now is an incredible investment for our future and for our children and or elders. It is without limit that I thank you, and I love you for what you’ve shown to me–that you are full of love for me and for this project. I thank you and my Ancestors thank you.

I have often complained on my blogs and in my talks about this hurtful lack of support from our community. I have been told by my elders, “thats how it is.” I cannot and will not accept this though. Enough is enough. When I have the opportunity to support and commit my money and mouth to African Americans I do it. My colleagues and acquaintances know when I rise, they ride. If I get a dollar, they get some of that dollar. If I get an opportunity, they get an opportunity. Our greatest might as a community comes not from reparations—or returns on the pain of our past–but from self-help and self-development coupled with community uplift through cooperative economics. What fuels that strength is education and inspiration.

Tomorrow night, Blair Underwood’s episode of the hit show, “Who Do You Think You Are,” will premier with Blair tracing his roots back through slavery, including a slave-holding African American ancestor, and on to West Africa through DNA results. cannot wait.

I will have my television set to a timer on Friday night and at 8:00 PM I will watch with bated breath the story of Blair Underwood’s family. I am eager for any details that might help aid my search. I am desperate to know what I can do to make things work and give this project the sort of rich content that can teach and reach people of all backgrounds. If you’re looking for an example of the emotional

Because my life, and this issue, is nothing compared to one day in the life of my enslaved Ancestors, I won’t take much of your time complaining. However, I write this to you, through tears because all around me I see our people suffering for lack of knowledge about themselves and their world and their role in history. I am tired of people talking about how African American men need to get their sh-t together and not dog our women, pick up a book, work hard, speak “properly,” not do drugs, not sell drugs……stay out of jail…How can you tell any of us that this is the ideal when I am here trying to make that ideal work…and yet I have seen limited support for this work.

I want to believe that my community is reading this and will respond. I want to have faith in my community. I have had faith in my community even when I have felt let down. I have had times where my faith has been restored because somebody took the time to stand up for me and my work. I want to have faith in my community even as I go to the places where my fathers and mothers died and served against their will. I want to help other African Americans take this journey and rescue their history for the future’s sake.

I am in love with our history. It is a passion that nothing, not even my supreme disappointment on days like this. I have seen hundreds of examples of African Americans buying chintz from China to “honor” President Barack Obama and the First Family. However, I am living in one of the largest African American metropolitan areas, and one of the most affluent, and this project has little momentum among African Americans. I have done my best–and my team has done its best to advertise this project.. and we are going to do more. I cannot let this tour go under before it gets started. We simply don’t have the luxury of cultural amnesia, nor do we have the luxury of giving our money to the People’s Republic of China while the People’s Republic of African America goes deeper into debt, poverty, mis-education, violence, mass incarceration, unemployment and disenfranchisement.

Right now as I write this, in Prince George’s Maryland there is a fifteen block line going to Prince George’s Plaza, waiting for sneakers–glow in the dark sneakers, Nike Galaxy’s priced at around 220 dollars. What does it say about Black America when I am struggling to get the word out and fund this project to honor my and our Ancestors while less than 30 minutes from where I sit there is a 15 block line on a winter night for sneakers…that will not make us smarter, honor our past, provide for our future, help us set up an adequate food system, or give us opportunities to be historians, scientists, chefs, teachers, writers, genealogists, agronomists, urban farmers, anthropologists or a host of other important occupations that can aid our future.

Let’s speak in the positive. This project is going to come to pass one way or the other. I am not giving up. I’m sure Nike and Starbucks will make the 8,000 we need in a matter of seconds…but I’m going to keep on pushing on. However I need your help:

1. Please donate to our project. It’s simple, its easy and if just 800 people gave 10 bucks, everything would be good–and we can think about what we need to do for the communities we visit and spread the wealth of knowledge, opportunity and history. We encourage you to give to your ability….10, 18, 36, and 50 are all below 100 bucks. If you can afford 100 or more–great…..But we have 70 days to fund this project and we need all the help we can get. And you get stuff for helping us :)

PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH US ON THIS SITE AND SHARE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY AND YOUR STORIES and RECIPES! The best buzz is when you write in and talk back!

REMEMBER this is for African American farmers, restaurant owners, urban farmers, fishermen, our children who live in food deserts, our elders who have stories to tell but nobody to write them down…..this is for all of us….

I”m counting on my community, I’m counting on you. Sharon Malone, who is the wife of Eric Holder, and the sister of Vivian Malone who integrated the University of Alabama, made a fantastic point. We are always looking for where we come from. And we know from our African wisdom traditions that’s the source of all of our future endeavors. We have a lot of love and resources to give back to you and we want to see a lot of people.

Want some empowerment to help us and other African American projects out, check out this inspiring couple: Check out The Empowerment Experiment: http://eefortomorrow.com